here’s news on this amazing find: the 1943 diary of a 14 year-old jewish-polish girl has been found. it sounds like an amazing interplay of normal early adolescent awakenings…

“I think my womanhood has awoken in me. That means, yesterday when I was taking a bath and the water stroked my body, I longed for someone’s hands to stroke me,” she wrote. “I didn’t know what it was, I have never had such sensations until now.”

banalities…

“I’m very bored. The entire day I’m walking around the room. I have nothing to do.”

and developmentally-normal faith and worldview questions…

“The little faith I used to have has been completely shattered. If God existed, He would have certainly not permitted that human beings be thrown alive into furnaces, and the heads of little toddlers be smashed with gun butts or shoved into sacks and gassed to death.”

interspersed with observations about the nazis and life in the jewish ghetto…

“The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter. I’m turning into an animal waiting to die.”

“I wish it would end already! This torment; this is hell. I try to escape from these thoughts of the next day, but they keep haunting me like nagging flies. If only I could say, it’s over, you only die once … but I can’t, because despite all these atrocities, I want to live, and wait for the following day.”

the article doesn’t say one way or the other, but i sure hope this will be released as a book.

(ht to stephen at emergesque)